Posts by matt

I went on a big Malcolm Gladwell kick in the beginning of January — go back and check my posts, you’ll see — ending last week with the reading of Blink, so here’s my take on the book.

I’d read several reviews before Blink came out painting it as some sort of self-help manual … How rapid cognition can work for you! (To be fair, Gladwell sort of promises this himself, in his introduction, which I think was a bad move.) Many were skeptical, like David Brooks:

My first impression of ”Blink” — in blurb-speak — was ”Fascinating! Eye-Opening! Important!” Unfortunately, my brain, like yours, has more than just a thin-slicing side. It also has that thick-slicing side. The thick-slicing side wants more than a series of remarkable anecdotes. It wants a comprehensive theory of the whole. It wants to know how all the different bits of information fit together.

That thick-slicing part of my brain wasn’t as happy with ”Blink,” especially the second time through. Gladwell never tells us how the brain performs these amazing cognitive feats; we just get the scattered byproducts of the mysterious backstage process. (There have been books by people like Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner that go deeper into the brain chemistry of it.)

The thick-slicing side isn’t even sure what this book is about. Is it about first impressions, or intuition, or that amorphous blending of ”what is” with ”what could be” that we call imagination? In some of his stories, it’s regular people who are making snap judgments; in others, it’s experts who have been through decades of formal training. In some experiments, the environment matters a great deal; in others, the setting is a psychologist’s lab. In some, the snap judgments are based on methodical reasoning — as with a scientist who has broken facial expressions into discrete parts; in others, the snap-judgment process is formless and instinctive. In some, priming is all-important; in others, priming is disregarded.

Moreover, the thick-slicing part of my brain is telling me that while it would be pleasing if we all had these supercomputers in our heads, Gladwell is overselling his case. Most of his heartwarming stories involve the lone intuitive rebel who ends up besting the formal, bureaucratic decision-making procedure. Though Gladwell describes several ways intuition can lead people astray, he doesn’t really dwell on how often that happens. But I’ve learned from other books, notably David G. Myers’s more methodical but less entertaining ”Intuition,” that there is a great body of data suggesting that formal statistical analysis is a much, much better way of predicting everything from the outcome of a football game to the course of liver disease than the intuition even of experts.

(“Thin-slicing,” by the way, is what Malcolm Gladwell calls that first instant when our brain filters in only the relevant data.)

Don’t believe the hype. Or rather, don’t believe the backlash.

Read more…

When I was in college, I used to love these two recordings by a University of Pennsylvania a cappella group — one was a cover of “Baby” by Nil Lara, the other a cover of Stevie Wonder’s version of the Beatles’ “We Can Work It Out.” The singer, John R. Stephens, had this throaty, incredible tenor and a break in his vocal range so gorgeous it sounded almost as though it had been painted into the digital recording after the fact. You can hear a hint of the break by listening to the clip of “Baby” here. Stephens was also a marvelous arranger.

Anyway, a few days ago, I purchased an album on iTunes by a singer named John Legend. I had loved one of its songs from the radio, and after listening to the clips, it appeared the whole thing was excellent. I couldn’t get over the thought that I’d heard that voice before, so I Googled my hunch that Mr. Legend was a renamed John R. Stephens, and I was, of course, correct.

This is just a roundabout way of recommending the album, while I’m in the business of making music recommendations. The man is incredible, even if I don’t much care for his stage name.

Ruben Fleischer has a new video out, and I think it may be my favorite of his many super-excellent music videos. It’s called “Galang” (look for the link at the bottom of the page), it’s by gorgeous Sri Lankan hip-hopper M.I.A., featuring her set against the backdrop of her animated artwork. Waaaaaaay too good not to share.

If anyone has an immediate urge to read this week’s NYT magazine cover article on Social Security (it’ll appear on-site tomorrow), knock yourself out. I was eager to read this one, so I went hunting for this one, and managed to dig it up, oh, two hours early or so.

The best arguments I’ve heard say leave Social Security alone for the moment until we’ve a) got money, and b) can figure out exactly how best to improve it. Kevin Drum says, simply, don’t worry your pretty little head about it. But even the Weekly Standard is urging against any rush to action.

But the tremendous momentum President Bush has given to privatizing Social Security means that, like it or not, something’s probably going to happen to the program very soon. The NYT article is a good run-through of what has happened to it since its inception, of the players involved in the debate now and how they came by their positions, and looks at some of the possible treatments.

The author ends, though, with a philosophical question that frames the issue in a way I like: To whom do we owe a greater debt — generations of the distant future, or of today and tomorrow?

Personal Activaire is a full service music source for people with iPods. All models accepted.

Tap into burgeoning underground music scenes. Listen and live to the sounds of NYC, London, Berlin, Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles, and Tokyo…

Perfect for people on the go! This service is ideal for those who have very little time, but who want to hear and become knowledgeable about current quality underground music. We bring you the best albums from rock, electro, hip hop, minimal-techno, house, and electronica labels from around the world.

Apparently, if your 70-hours-a-week I-banking gig has you too over-scheduled to go cruising the back alleys of Tokyo on your own, just FedEx your iPod to this company, and for a measly $200 a pop, you’ll get it back, loaded with 10 albums from the sonic fringes of the global indie underground.

Note that the assurances of connectedness to the far reaches of the obscure come with no actual markers of musical taste. Except for a ridiculously long list of independent record label links. I imagine this is a sample of the undiscovered urban wilderness I’ll be exploring, right? That’s so gorram crunk. I’ll make sure to catch them live on the BBC.

I’m in love with this. Just seven years after the Gladwell article, we can finally buy our own personal Coolhunters.

According to The New Yorker, Robert Spitzer “revolutionized psychiatry.”

Make that, “according to Alix Spiegel, writing for The New Yorker.” The distinction is important, because a cursory Google-fueled traipse through the Internet reveals that Alix Spiegel is Robert Spitzer’s chief (only?) biographer. Spiegel-authored pieces on Spitzer also appear on NPR and This American Life.

The question “Who is Robert Spitzer?” is important, because if you believe Spiegel, Spitzer might be the father of modern psychiatry. So if Spitzer turns out to be a genius, then this psychiatry business may have something to it. But if he’s a quack, who’s to say his baby’s not as well?

Read more…

… why not go whole hog?

Jared Diamond has a new book. Malcolm Gladwell has a new article. Some correlation exists between these two joyous events.

Listening to authors read from their own works is a much better idea on paper than in reality.

But these are some damn fine authors, and those are some damn fine works. The quality of the audio’s pretty bad, sadly.

Paul Auster’s got an awesome gravelly Joe Frank-ish radio voice — he’s an NPR contributor and the author of some of my favorite books — so check out his excerpt from The Book of Illusions. Philip Roth also does a great job. The Mary Gaitskill story is incredible, her reading, not so much, so here’s an excerpt in text. Read the whole thing if you can find it.

Saheli has compiled an excellent list of organizations assisting in disaster relief, as well as some commentary on the tragedy.

The sociological debate over whether black Americans deprecate academic achievement has been raging for decades now with much heat and little light. The item in today’s NYT Magazine about “The ‘Acting White’ Myth” is no better than any of the other mostly uninformed articles on the topic.

I’ve been following this debate for years. Two years ago, I started a MetaFilter discussion on the topic, and today’s NYT article brought it up again. So I chimed in with my attempt to explain why sociological studies come to different conclusions on the subject of alleged black intellectualism.

The phrase “acting white” was unearthed in the sociological community by professors Signithia Fordham and John Ogbu in 1986. The chief problem with these professors’ findings was one of nuance, and they drew much criticism for their paper on the subject. But in 2002, another pair of researchers attempted to polish Fordham and Ogbu’s thesis with a second study. And here I’ll copy and paste from my comment in today’s MetaFilter thread.

What this second study found was that black students were much likelier to reject a plethora of signal behaviors that typically correlate with academic achievement. It’s not the achievement itself. It’s the act of cultural treachery that comes with it. From the study:

Another young man, now a record producer and rap recording artist, had gone away to Exeter, the elite private preparatory school, and come back dressing and speaking differently from when he left. He was accused of acting white. His interpretation of why former friends in the community were a little